Stepping Out of Line

Becoming and Being a Feminist

Cheryl Hercus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415930321
• eBook ISBN: 9781135955656
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What does it mean to be a feminist today? Why do some women become feminists and others do not? At a time when 'feminist' is a label that many young women shun, Stepping Out of Line offers an insightful account of the struggle of becoming and being a feminist. Cheryl Hercus offers a compelling new argument for why some women embrace feminism and why others do not. In doing so, she moves beyond the stereotypes of what feminism means while providing a new understanding of feminist social movements of resistance and collective action.

CHAPTER 1
Developing a Model of
Feminist Becoming and Being

Although for many feminists the concept of the “click” resonates powerfully as a pivotal moment in their becoming feminist, it is limited as an explanation of the transformation of consciousness, emotions, identity, and action that are involved in this process. If not as a single click, how, then, might we explain the process of becoming and being feminist? In my quest to answer this question, to understand both my own personal journey and the lives of the women whose stories form the empirical basis of this study, I have found both feminist and social movements research and theory to be helpful.

Anthony Giddens, in New Rules of Sociological Method, writes about two interacting levels of sociological understanding, which he labels the double hermeneutic.¹ The first level involves understanding social life from the perspective of social actors. This requires a closeness or immersion in the lives of those being researched and is achieved through ethnographic observation, interviews, and other forms of qualitative research. The second level involves stepping back from immersion in social action, to a position outside, from where the phenomenon under study is interpreted using the concepts and theories of social science.

When this model of sociological understanding is applied to my research, feminist writings on consciousness and identity and on what it means to be a woman and a feminist contribute to the first level of understanding implied by the double hermeneutic. Reading this material, which emanates from within the feminist women’s movement, forms part of my understanding of the movement, as an actor who is part of the movement. The second level of understanding in the double hermeneutic, comes from the “outsider” view taken by sociological theories of social movements, and my position as a sociologist who tries to understand general processes relating people to social movements.

In an increasingly reflexive world, however, the boundary between these two positions —in this case, of being inside the movement and identifying with feminism while also being outside and drawing upon a rich sociological tradition of scholarship on social movements—is not clear cut. As Giddens points out, there is a two-way interaction between these two levels of interpretive understanding. In modern society, meanings generated by social actors inform the meanings generated by social science and vice versa. From a position within feminism, I see sociology as a discipline where male voices and male perspectives have been, and still are, dominant. Thus, feminist theory can become the outside position from which I reflect on social movements theory. I envisage this as being like two mirrors—or, more precisely, two multifaceted mirrors, representing the variety of perspectives within both feminist and sociological theory—arranged facing each other, endlessly reflecting each other into infinity. The position from which I write is located between these two sets of mirrors. The concepts and theories from both feminist and social movements literature, reflecting on each other, offer a fuller understanding, if also a more complex picture, of what it is to be a feminist and how women become feminist.² It can also illuminate the way participants in any social movement are actively involved in constructing the movement and its meaning.

In this chapter, my first goal is to review feminist and social movements literature to show how these two “mirrors” inform my understanding of the process, particularly as it relates to the central questions addressed by the study. Following this, I outline a model of feminist becoming and being, based on a metaphor of fractal geometry.

Reflections from the Feminist Literature

Since the 1970s, feminists have been writing about issues of consciousness and identity, and how they relate to social and political change. They wrote initially in a celebratory fashion as they tried to explain the powerful sense of injustice, but also the feeling of liberation associated with becoming feminist.³ Later they wrote in a more reflective fashion, as differences between women were explored in the context of difficult attempts to forge feminist solidarity.

In the early days of the women’s liberation movement, in the late 1960s and 1970s, many women in the Western world underwent the type of awakening distilled in the concept of the click through participating in consciousness-raising (CR) groups. In CR groups, they met together, talked about their personal experiences, and collectively discovered the social and political causes of their problems. Inspired by their own profound personal transformation, some began to write and theorize about CR. Since many early participants had begun their political lives through involvement in the New Left, they turned to familiar Marxist concepts of class consciousness and false consciousness to explain the process of becoming and being feminist. It was argued that women generally were unaware of the effects of male domination or patriarchy because of “its ability to masquerade as the ‘natural’ and inevitable form of social organization.”⁴ CR was the means by which this masquerade, or false consciousness, was shown for what it was, and the truth revealed.⁵

It was generally assumed that feminist identity and feminist activism were the direct result of feminist consciousness. All women were oppressed in a patriarchal society and thus shared a set of experiences as women. Becoming feminist was the result of a woman having her consciousness raised to a point where she recognized her oppression as a woman and her common interests with other women, expressed as sisterhood.

The practice of CR in groups formed solely for this purpose dissipated in most Western societies by the late 1970s. Nonetheless, women continued to come into contact with feminist ideas and become feminist through the texts and organizations that grew out of this period. The strong sense of unity and strength experienced by many participants in the early days of women’s liberation did not continue, however, and cracks among the sisterhood began to appear. Ideas about what it meant to be a feminist and, indeed, what it meant to be a woman, came under scrutiny.⁶ The universalizing nature of much feminist discourse came under fire as women from ethnic and racial minorities, lesbians, and working-class women argued that their experiences were often quite different from those of the white, heterosexual, middle-class women who initially constituted the public face of the movement.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the notions of false consciousness and of the universal nature of women’s oppression were called into question, but the privileging of personal experience as the basis of “true” consciousness was retained. In the words of Nickie Charles, the result was a turn to identity politics. Discussing the British context, she suggests that “the dominant feminist identity of the . . . women’s liberation movement became split into many identities—of lesbians, of black feminists, of Irish feminists, of working class feminists, of Jewish feminists—and recognized as being specific to a particular group of women.”⁷ As was the case in earlier formulations, consciousness and identity were still viewed as flowing directly from experience, although now differences of experience and resultant consciousness and identities were recognized. Where this might leave a woman who was, say, lesbian, black, and Jewish, was not asked.

Beginning in the 1980s and extending into the 1990s, a more profound challenge to the conceptualization of experience as the basis of feminist consciousness and identity was mounted by poststructuralist feminists. Claiming that all experiences are already textually mediated interpretations, poststructuralist writers came to view the concepts of consciousness and identity as being hopelessly enmeshed in humanist notions of the stable, rational self. Rather than being transparent reflections of reality, consciousness and identity, according to poststructuralists, are aspects of subjectivity created through “positioning” and “discursive practices” that create the fiction of a unified, knowing, self.⁸

A danger with poststructuralist analyses, however, is the tendency to de-politicize the women’s movement since the deconstruction of feminist consciousness, identity, and experience, indeed, of the very categories of “gender” and “women,” leaves no basis on which to organize collectively. Radical and socialist feminists have expressed concern that the possibility of political action is lost as the existence of any reality beyond the text is denied by poststructuralists.⁹ For example, Somer Brodribb, writing from a radical feminist perspective, argues that the problems of dualism—reason/emotion, nature/culture, mind/body, and male/female—are inappropriately resolved in postmodern/poststructuralist theory through a denial of female difference. In her view, rather than dismantling these binary oppositions, the deconstruction of the category “woman,” which is central to such theories, actually represents the ultimate triumph of reason over emotion, culture over nature, and mind over body. Postmodern theory “claims to lift identity right off the skin, the body . . . Mind will no longer need to make reference to body in its identity claims; unchained at last from the sensations and limitations of the flesh.”¹⁰ From a different perspective, Iris Marion Young finds the deconstruction of the categories “gender” and “women” compelling, but nonetheless paralyzing since they do not address the “pragmatic political reasons for insisting on the possibility of thinking about women as some kind of group.”¹¹ An important pragmatic reason for retaining some conceptualization of women as a collective, according to Young, is the necessity of maintaining some point of view beyond liberal individualism that generally operates to obscure the systematic and structured nature of oppression.

The debate between postmodern/poststructuralist feminists and feminists coming from radical and socialist feminist traditions has not been resolved. While the deconstructive work of the poststructuralists is compelling, many feminists still cling to a desire for a theory that can ground personal identity and political action. While some feminists are busy doing deconstructive work, others feel threatened by a project that appears to destroy categories that support identity and solidarity. In this book I hope to contribute toward a way out of this impasse. In my view, a shortcoming of the debate is that it has largely been carried out at a theoretical level among feminist academics. Little attention has been paid to the possible contribution that could be made to the debate by ordinary women doing actual politics. Empirical research into feminist subjectivity and politics as they are experienced and practiced by women in grassroots settings removed from prestigious women’s studies departments, shows how women respond to feminist discourse in its myriad forms, how they come to share a collective sense of “being” women engaged in a common political project, and how they respond in specific ways to the diversity of their experience.

In the fractal model I outline later and develop throughout this book, I have chosen to use the term feminist subjectivity to depict being feminist at the broadest level. This is consistent with feminist poststructuralist approaches; however, alongside numerous other feminist writers, I reject textual foundationalism.¹² I do not view subjectivity as solely discursive, but as consisting of multiple components, including both psychological and biological aspects. Embodiment is integral to this conceptualization of subjectivity. Feminist consciousness, emotions, identity, and action, which I examine in this book, are all embodied aspects of subjectivity. Thought occurs in the brain (a part of the body) just as emotion is both the increased beating of the heart as well as the cognitive processes that interpret this beating. We do things like marching in a protest or signing a petition with our arms and legs, we speak to others and chant slogans with our voices, but we form the intentions and thoughts embodied by these actions in our minds. And our bodies can sit with a group in a room, or march with them in a protest, while our minds are elsewhere.

Reflections from the Social Movements Literature

Representing the second mirror, issues similar to those discussed above have been addressed by social movements scholars in their attempts to understand how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. Diverse theoretical perspectives within the field are based on varying assumptions about the nature of social movements and the nature of the “self” who participates in them. From a feminist perspective, these underlying assumptions are not inconsequential. For instance, most social movement theory and research has until recently reproduced a range of binary oppositions such as reason/emotion, public/private, culture/nature, male/female that, although central to Western social and political thought, have been extensively critiqued by feminists as providing justification for gendered power relationships.¹³ There is a risk, therefore, that women’s experiences of getting involved and participating in social movements may be marginalized and their voices silenced if mainstream theoretical orientations are adopted uncritically. In the following brief review of theoretical positions within this field, the value of each approach to an understanding of women’s experiences is paramount.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the collective behavior approach dominated the sociological study of social movements. Although two strands developed, one associated with symbolic interaction and the other with structural functionalism, the structural-functionalist version as elaborated by Neil Smelser has been particularly influential and problematic. In Smelser’s formulation, social movements represent the irrational and emotional response of marginalized individuals to structural strain. Concomitantly, movement participants are viewed as psychologically disturbed individuals manipulated by clever movement leaders who formulate and disseminate generalized beliefs as “short-circuited” exaggerations of reality. In the absence of effective social control, such generalized beliefs are translated into irrational episodes of collective behavior.¹⁴ Inherently conservative, the collective behavior approach has functioned to discredit movement participants and their ideas.¹⁵ It has proved particularly problematic for analyses of women’s activism given the historical association of women with emotion and irrationality.¹⁶ Despite being largely discredited and superceded by more recent approaches, the historical context of this perspective sheds light on the neglect of emotion in subsequent theories of social movements’ emergence and participation.

The resource mobilization approach to social movements presents a quite different picture. Developed during the 1970s and 1980s in opposition to the collective behavior approach, resource mobilization theory (RMT) looked beyond the grievances of marginalized groups for an explanation of movement emergence and growth. It focused instead on the availability of resources and political opportunities for mobilization.¹⁷ Turning to questions of recruitment and participation, RMT rejected psychological descriptions of movement involvement as pathological. Instead, individuals who became involved in social movements came to be viewed as rational agents who weighed the costs and benefits before choosing to join social movements organizations (SMOs) and/or participate in protest events. Links to other movement members through informal movement networks facilitate this process of micromobilization.¹⁸ Consistent with the introduction of rational choice assumptions to the study of collective action, researchers working within the RMT framework focused their attention on the organizational-level analysis of SMOs and their strategies.¹⁹

From a feminist perspective, the RMT emphasis on instrumental goals and the inherent rationality of movement involvement appears initially as an advance on the collective behavior approach that reinforced images of (feminine) irrationality. However, the underlying assumptions of RMT present their own problems. By reversing, but not discarding, reason/emotion dualism and by focusing on instrumental goals of movement organizations, RMT has difficulty explaining precisely those features of women’s collective action and movement identities that are most distinctive and interesting.²⁰ The emotional dimension of movement involvement, which is so evident in the stories told to me by the women in this study, is excluded from analysis, as are cultural and informal forms of political action in everyday life. A major theoretical contribution of the women’s liberation period of feminism was the reconceptualization of politics to include recognition of the political nature of personal life; any adequate model of feminist subjectivity and feminist involvement must take this into account.

RMT also falls short in terms of theorizing structural inequality and power relations at a macro le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “I’m Not a Feminist . . . Or Am I?”
• Chapter 1: Developing a Model of Feminist Becoming and Being
• Chapter 2: Feminist Movements: Past, Present, Local, and Global
• Chapter 3: Becoming Feminist: Paths and Passages
• Chapter 4: Tensions and Contradictions In the Construction Ofmeaning and Identity
• Chapter 5: Up Against It: Opposition and Control
• Chapter 6: Participation In Feminist Events and Organizations
• Chapter 7: Establishing Feminist Presence In Daily Life
• Chapter 8: Conclusion: Stepping Out of Line
• Endnotes
• Bibliography